WASHINGTON -- A six-year-old memo from within the George W. Bush administration that came to light this week acknowledges that White House-approved interrogation techniques amounted to "war crimes." The memo's release has called attention to what has changed since President Barack Obama took office, but it also raises questions about what hasn't.
The Bush White House tried to destroy every copy of the memo, written by then-State Department counselor Philip Zelikow. Zelikow examined tactics like waterboarding -- which simulates drowning -- and concluded that there was no way they were legal, domestically or internationally.
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"We didn't worry so much about that because the Bush Administration was seen as an outlier and an aberration, and the Bush precedent wouldn't have been seen as weighty," Jaffer said. By contrast, "It's not at all difficult to imagine [future presidents] citing President Obama in their defense of carrying out more targeted killings of American citizens."
"Now we're making many of these emergency powers permanent ... and bipartisan. We're enshrining these things into our permanent law."
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Where does that leave us? "I wouldn't call us an outlaw nation," Blanton said, "but I don't think we've come to terms with our gang period."http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/torture-memo-bush_n_1408612.html
The band of criminals who've taken up residence in key United States offices are not to be feared. They are to be ridiculed as the incompetent goofs that they are, like those who get the Stupidest Criminal award --some idiot, maybe, who holds up a bank by writing his demand on his own deposit slip.
What these criminals in Washington didn't consider is that their prize --the entire machinery of the United States government, to be used as they saw fit-- becomes useless the further it veers from recognizable lawful government.
I'm no lawyer, but even my layman's understanding of the discipline is that law is built upon reason and the promotion of upright human behavior. Deep in a law book somewhere must be the dusty, long-ignored maxim that if a law makes you physically ill, no reasonable person can be expected to follow it. It shocks the conscience. It would be like passing a law to compel people to commit murder.
And what with the provisions of the NDAA, whereby the unwashed hired help in Washington have reserved to themselves the authority to kidnap and execute anyone, anywhere, for any reason, the entire jurisdiction now is repugnant to even the slimmest sense of human decency. The jurisdiction itself now shocks the conscience. These criminals are so morally deficient and so arrogant that they forgot about the existence of non-deranged people, and they forgot about that maxim of law.
The jurisdiction went bye-bye, winking out of existence --bink!-- right into a black hole of nothingness, a legalistic matter/anti-matter collision of its own making. These criminals actually caused their prize to cease to exist in law by permitting entry-level legal technicians like Jay Bybee and Alberto Gonzales to hazard to speak on matters.
As I said, no human follows a United States law. The association would prove a stain on any decent person's character. You don't consort with hookers and thieves and murderers, do you? You can't legalize tyranny. And I defy any lawyer in my audience to come on up on stage and explain to us all why any human should feel morally obligated to recognize that DISEASE which fancies itself a jurisdiction.
When I am done with that malfunctioning mess, they'll be hard pressed to pull a wire tap. All such requests will have to come before a panel of three --a judge, a housewife, and an ex-con. If any of them say no, that's the end of it. And it won't much matter because our nation's finest likely would never get the right guys anyway. They'd spend an entire decade chasing after the Haqqani Network, and White Al Qaeda, and the Astro Genital Brigade and their ion-propelled gunships from crystal cities on Venus.
Should the Director of the FBI protest upon learning of the new, three-person panel to which all surveillance requests must be submitted, I, as the Chairman of the Something Committee, would reply, "You'd never get the right guys anyway, so what difference does it make?"
Can a single law enforcement professional in my audience argue otherwise?
Of course not.
From moral authority flows political authority. And from political authority flows legal authority. You know your jurisdiction has hit rock bottom when not a single United States employee in my audience can argue with a straight face that the jurisdiction any longer possesses the moral propulsive force to utter even a single word. It has succumbed to legal emphysema, essentially.
The commandment to the speaking of law is the breath of life into a jurisdiction. United States now stands mute before humanity. Ergo, the jurisdiction has died.
I yield the balance of my time for any rebuttal.
